#ah the inherent homoeroticism of tending to each others wounds

[wispscribbles]

Patch up

[mossy-covered-bones]

Stitches and Kisses

DP Shiptember 2021

Wednesday: Patching Each Other Up

Ship: Savant Par (Tucker/Danny)

TWs: injuries and blood/ectoplasm

AO3

*

Danny placed the cap back on the thermos, chest heaving as he slowly floated back to the ground.

The adrenaline of a fight started to drain away, and he was smacked with a wave of pain and fatigue. His shoulder ached, and the gash in his side that was oozing ectoplasm stung, and he felt like he was covered in bruises.

It had just been Skulker, but it was late and Danny had barely slept the night before, so he kept making stupid mistakes, dodging too slow or missing openings that could have ended the fight sooner.

He’d probably bleed out if he switched back to his human form right now—he was already starting to feel woozy from blood loss. Ectoplasm loss?

He couldn’t go back to Fenton Works in his ghost form, since his parents had the sensors running, so that ruled out going back there to sew himself up or grab his phone. Not that any stitches he’d do on his side would be anywhere near good, at the angles the wound was at. Sam was usually his go-to for sewing him up, since Tucker couldn’t handle the blood very well, but they were out of town for a college visit right now.

Danny sent a silent prayer to whatever god wanted to take pity on him that day and started making his way to Tucker’s.

He wasn’t that far away, but it took longer to get there than normal, given how tired Danny was and that he had to split his energy between flying and keeping himself invisible so nobody could follow him to his friend’s house.

Tuck was sitting at the computer in his room, perfectly visible from Danny’s place at the window. He looked up when Danny knocked, eyes lighting up when Danny popped back into visibility.

He hopped up from his desk to pull the window open. “Hey, stranger! What brings you to my humble abode?”

Danny giggled, leaning against the windowsill to keep himself from sinking to the ground. “Hey, Tuck. You busy?”

“Nah, what’s up?”

“I, uh… kinda need a patch job.”

Tucker’s smile turned stiff. “Right, right. Come on in, I can fix ya up. I’m not just a pretty face, y’know.” He turned to pull his medkit out from under the bed.

Danny drifted through the wall, letting his feet audibly thud against the carpet.

Tucker spread an old blanket stained with green and red over his bedding, patting the soft surface. “Sit, let's have a looksie.”

“Geez, Tuck. Buy me dinner before you try and get me into your bed,” Danny joked, all but collapsing onto the mattress. “Sew me up, doc.”

Tucker chuckled, taking a second to glance over his friend. Danny didn’t miss how Tucker blanched when he caught sight of the gash in Danny’s side.

“Okay, let’s get this jumpsuit off,” Tucker muttered, feeling for the zipper at the collar. He peeled the rubbery material off slowly, Danny helping as best he could.

Danny hissed in pain as Tucker started to clean up the wound, one hand holding Danny still as he moped up red-tinged ectoplasm.

“So what happened?”

“Skulker.” Danny took a shaky breath, staring up at the white popcorn ceiling. “He got some new toys, managed to distract me enough to get a swing in with a serrated blade.”

Tucker let out a low whistle. “Did he give up on your pelt or something?”

“I think he’s pissed everyone else keeps giving me scars, actually. Or he’s fed up with me always capturing him. I wasn’t exactly paying attention.” He was too busy trying to keep Skulker from killing him a second time.

Tucker nodded, withdrawing his hands from where they had been pressed against Danny’s stomach. “Yeah, dude’s way too fickle with his plans for your remains.”

“More like just a hypocrite.”

Tucker chuckled. “Definitely. Alright, I’m gonna start your stitches now. Try not to bleed through the Med Blanket this time, alright?”

“I’ll do my best.”

Danny’s hands gripped the blanket under him as Tucker started pulling the needle through his flesh, slowly sewing him back together.

He bit the inside of his cheek to keep from voicing his pain, eyes flitting about the room to find something else to concentrate on, something to distract from the pain.

They settled on Tucker’s face. Thick framed glasses perched on the end of his nose, eyes flicking back and forth as he worked, tongue occasionally darting out to run over his lips. He looked nervous—of course he looked nervous, Tucker still hated the sight of blood, even if he could tolerate it, and he hadn’t given Danny stitches anywhere near as often as Sam had—but his hands were steady as he guided the needle, movements slow and sure.

Danny took a second to take in his hands, brushing Danny’s abdominal muscles and the bottom of his ribs as Tucker worked. They were lightly calloused, from the tinkering Tucker did in his free time and the Fenton Works weapons he sometimes used.

Tucker paused just long enough to push his glasses back up his nose, glancing up at Danny. “Hey, how you holding up?”

Danny startled, realizing his eyes had wandered back to Tucker’s lips. He forced a wan grin. “Hurts, but I’ll live. Well, half live. How much do you have left?”

“Just a few more stitches, I’ll be done soon. PInky promise.”

Danny winced as the needle was once again jabbed into his skin. “Oh, good.”

His breath caught as Tucker leaned forward, hovering just a few inches above hin

Excuse his mind for jumping there, but Danny was only wearing half of his clothes, he was kind of lightheaded from pain and ectoplasm loss, and Tucker looked kinda hot when he was concentrating. Plus the inherent homoeroticism of tending to your friend’s wounds. Danny’s eyes wandered back to his friend’s lips of their own free will.

Maybe Danny just read too much fanfiction.

Tucker’s hands stilled against his stomach, lingering just a little too long for what Danny would consider to be appropriate for platonically patching your buddy. He leaned back with an exclamation of “All done!”

Danny was probably just reading too much into it. He shook his head, starting to push himself back up. “Thanks, Tuck, I should—“

A hand was at his shoulder—the one that had gotten hurt in his fight with Skulker—pushing him back down. “Dude, you looked a little woozy when you got here, and you keep spacing out. Just take it easy for a little bit.”

He fell back with little resistance, sighing dramatically. “If you insist.”

“Hey, I am on doctor duty today. That means my word is, like, legally binding,” Tucker said, packing up the medkit.

“Sure, whatever helps you sleep at night.”

Tucker laid down on the bed next to Danny. “Not having teenaged half-dead superheroes in my bed at nine pm would definitely help.”

“Wait, you’ve had other half-dead superheroes in your bed? Tucker, are you cheating on me?”

“Ah, you caught me, there’s another man. Though I wouldn’t worry about it, he’s nowhere near as handsome as you.”

They broke out in laughter, Tucker turning to stifle his giggles in his bedding while Danny tilted to the side to take the strain off his injury as his sides started to shake with mirth.

The sound trailed off into short chuckles, and Danny glanced over to Tucker, mouth open in the beginning of a reply that cut off when Danny saw his friend’s expression.

The corners of Tucker’s eyes were still creased from laughing, a fond smile on his lips. He was tilted onto his side, and Danny realized if he were just a few inches closer their noses would be brushing.

Danny could easily lean over and kiss him.

He felt his face flush at the thought, eyes once again finding their way to Tucker’s lips. He was breathless in a way that had nothing to do with the battle from twenty minutes ago.

Tucker just barely leaned forward, eyelids sinking half closed.

Despite the heat in his cheeks, Danny leaned forward to meet him.

The kiss was soft and slow and short, Tucker pulling back way too soon to shoot Danny a shit eating grin. “Hey, are we in a bromance now?”

Danny absolutely did not hit Tucker with a pillow for that comment, vehemently denying the barely hidden giggles, and he totally didn’t pull Tucker in for another, longer kiss.

[meikuree]

fic writer interview

tagged by @lightdescending -- tysm, this was really fun and i enjoy elaborating on things about writing/the writing process!

putting this under a read more because of my trademark verbosity (AGAIN)

name: meikuree

fandoms: actively writing for snk, tempted to write for the locked tomb

two-shot: oh i've not intentionally done these! twenty years of snow accidentally fits the bill, but only because it's on an indefinite hiatus

most popular multi-chapter: of aubades, my pieck-centric ficlet series, by some metrics

actual worst part of writing: when I get stuck in a loop of perfectionism and excessive self-scrutiny and rewrite… and rewrite… and rewrite again. my solution to this is to send it to a friend and ask for them to tell me just one (1) nice thing about it and put me out of my misery, or do freewriting where the point is to write whatever immediately pops into my head. usually then I’ll bump into an epiphany in the middle about how to Make It Work.

alternatively: fic writing is at times such a solitary, obsessively recursive activity and that’s one tension I dislike/have to negotiate with, because part of why I like art is to share it with people or at the very least engage in some kind of reciprocal conversation about it. community in art is very important to me in general, and I try to cultivate it in my online presence in small ways!

how you choose your titles: i'm a fan of grabbing titles from poems and songs/song lyrics (like you!) -- and drawing them from regina spektor songs in particular, bc she’s by some metrics my all-time favourite musician and i’m very familiar with her discography

do you outline: usually, yes. i don’t confine myself to it, but at minimum I outline pivotal moments and turning points. my process tends to start with a compelling scene or character interaction popping into my head and then goes on with me thinking about how i can use it as a vehicle for communicating a certain concept/philosophical idea/insight about XYZ characters' relationships somehow. that becomes the core idea/endpoint I want to reach by the end in a fic, so then i'll outline the main emotional or introspective beats i want to carry across in service of that

ideas I probably won’t get around to but wouldn’t it be nice: wow, um... /gestures vaguely at my unending list of wips/ that said, one idea i'm tickled by is an obnoxious, utterly random M-rated pieck/lady tybur fic involving painplay and knifeplay, the plot for which is literally just… lara tybur stabs pieck with a knife, but make it sexy somehow… with a dash of political intrigue and a complicated ambiguous relationship where two women use each other in a decidedly callous but also self-aware and self-indulgent way. the idea for this just came from me going "ah yes... the inherent homoeroticism of being stabbed by another woman..." and wondering about ~scenarios enabled by being a titan shifter, when you can regenerate your wounds and such! (partial inspiration also came, I will admit, from the locked tomb fandom and its lesbian body horror influences)

callouts @ me: sensory details are one of my biggest weak points. i've been ironing it out through concerted practice, but when i first started out writing fic i tended to be more comfortable dealing with metaphor, introspection, and mental states than... writing about actual, corporeal things happening in corporeal textspace. it can create the impression while reading, I suspect, that the characters are stuck a lot in their own heads. one of my earliest and favourite ao3 comments i've gotten said in passing that i used "very little dialogue and description" and i'm still tickled by... how true it is as an MO. it also amuses me because it seems to parallel the same issue i had with essays i wrote at university, i think (!) -- my professors would tell me, “you have a great grasp on the theory but you need to include more concrete examples." and i'd go "what? i was supposed to use examples?? ?__? isn’t the point self-evident from the theory?” for me, shifts in relationship dynamics and the negotiation of one's worldview underlying an event ARE the plot! -- and everything else tends to become subservient to that when i write

the other thing, which is somewhat related to the above, is just... self-confidence! i can be very insecure about my writing style, as my partner and poor friends I’ve whinged to can attest. mainly because i always fear that reading it feels like wading through a thick, unappealing swampy bog of someone's thoughts. but i think the solution is to just take a grounded, balanced view, like: there are some things i do well, and some things i do not-as-well in writing, and that's fine! that's normal! and in the moment i can be very hard on myself, and wring my hands thinking OH MY GOD THE UTTER CRINGE OF ME WRITING ANY OF THIS but i find that somehow, i always end up enjoying rereading what i write.

best writing traits: the most consistent comment i get, i think, is that my writing is beautiful and poetic (and one time: "this is one of the most poetic things i've ever read." which -- ?!?!). I’ve also been told that i characterise people well or with nuance, and write about them sensitively and with depth. i'm grateful, always, to hear these bc these things constitute the one niche i CAN do, imo!

spicy tangential opinion: hm… from what I’ve observed, many fandoms have a tendency to flatten character motives and complexities into easy, tidy and dare i say, sometimes bizarre, labels and categories. it’s not surprising it happens, but sometimes there’s space for people (a big, vague, nonspecific ‘people’) to go beyond simplistic assumptions about characters and one-dimensional portrayals (and to give writers who achieve it their due! I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen an incredibly well-written fic that was relatively undernoticed and gone, “why, fandom???”) sometimes you write to fix canon, and sometimes you write because it’s fanon that needs fixing instead.

tagging (no pressure): @ebbet @noxcounterspell @leksaa90 @minoan-ophidian @frumpkinspocketdimension @acerinky @rose-gardens @chocochipbiscuit @whiteasy @ochen @kallistoi  anyone else who wants to join in!